Browsing by Author "Laakkonen, Otso"

Objectives. Geomedia has been part of Finnish elementary school curriculum for five years in grades 3–6. Geomedia as a concept gathers old content with new one in the pursuit of devel-oping geography in school. Success of geomedia in teaching derives from perceptions of teachers, textbooks, and local curriculums. According to expectation value theory teachers perceived competence, task value of content and expectancies for its success in teaching ex-plain the motivation of how teachers invest in teaching of variable teaching contents. The re-search problem was to clarify the state of geomedia in 3rd to 6th grades. Methods. The study was conducted in the form of pragmatic exploratory mixed methods re-search using parallel convergent design. Design combined quantitative and qualitative data and methods. Data consisted 846 quantitative answers and 21 qualitative answers from open-ended question in the survey research conducted in the autumn 2020 by order of the Finnish National Agency for Education. Additional qualitative data was provided through the analysis of three textbook series and five local curricula. Quantitative data was presented though table and analysed using correlation. Qualitative data was analysed using content analysis. Results and conclusions. The concept of geomedia was not defined in any local curriculum and it was verbalized in one textbook only. Due to the broad formulation of the concept of ge-omedia, all textbooks included geomedia in its mainly older form and in such way, it was not consciously used by teachers and pupils in learning. The perceived expectancy value to teach geomedia was clearly lower compared to other main contents of geography in science teach-ing. This result was explained by the teachers lack of understanding about geomedia. Fur-thermore, teachers didn’t have the applicable teaching materials and had not received any additional training for the usage of geomedia in teaching. Since the poor competence of teachers leads to reliance on learning material, it can be stated that geomedia is not rooted as a conscious concept in teaching. If geomedia was defined and instructed from the pupil’s point of view of using technology in their daily lives, it could renew the teaching of geography. Developing the perceived competence of teachers through additional training and research based-learning materials would, based on expectation value theory and results, increase the importance of how the teachers perceive content in their teaching. In this way, it would be possible to redeem geomedia among the more entrenched teaching content of geography.